New DIY Kit Turns Household Items Into Drones (PopSci.com)

Your own evil empire is just within your grasp! Even as 3-D printing is working with liquid metals at room temp, you can now turn your old motherboards, keyboards, mice, and more into the unmanned vehicles you’ve always wanted thanks to Jasper van Loenen’s Vimeo video.

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This 3-D printing kit lets you transform any sufficiently light object into a flying quadrotor.

DIY Keyboard Drone Jasper van Loenen, via Vimeo

Really, why shouldn’t keyboards fly? A new suitcase-size kit by Dutch artist Jasper van Loenen lets you attach four rotors to almost any object so that you can fly it like a drone.

The kit includes instructions for 3-D printing four clamps that screw into the object and hold the mounts for propellers. You also need to 3-D print a body to house the electronics, which include a radio receiver, flight controller, bluetooth module, and four motors, each with an electronic speed controller.

The software for piloting the drone comes from OpenPilot, an open source autopilot and stabilization project. A full parts list can be found here, and the DIY drone even has an Instructables page.

In the video below, van Loenen drone-ifies a bicycle tire, a keyboard, a boogie board, a book, and an old landline phone. The possibilites are constrained almost entirely by physics—too heavy an object and the motors can’t lift it, too weirdly shaped and it won’t be able to fly straight. For now, there’s no camera included in the plans, so the pilot has to remain in sight of the drone.